Marks and Spencer store

Asia
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Our team have a long-standing relationship with Marks & Spencer. Back in 1996, Arcadis led the delivery of the Hong Kong flagship store, which was later nominated for CIOB Project of the Year. We have since assisted with the regional expansion throughout Hong Kong, and into the Chinese market.

1st

store in Asia opened

10

stores in China delivered

Based in the UK, Marks & Spencer is an international, multi-channel retailer, providing a range of clothing, home-wares, and food and beverage products. With over £10 billion in revenue, they are a pioneer for the high street industry and now operate over 1,200 stores worldwide.

In order to broaden their international presence, M&S continue to diversify their store locations, channels and product ranges. Their ongoing aim is to make M&S products even more accessible to customers around the world in Europe, the Middle-East and Asia, through new stores and a multi-channel approach.

In China, their plan was to introduce and expand their store presences as fast as possible, in order to ‘catch-up’ to the other leading retailers who were already operating in the market. To give M&S a competitive advantage in the retail industry in China, it was imperative to deliver these stores within a quick time frame whilst adhering to the set budget. As this is a new market for M&S, they required the knowledge and experience from a company that was already familiar with both the retail and construction industries in China.

Our retail professionals managed the introduction of Marks & Spencer into the Asian market with their first stores in Hong Kong, and after the successful completion of these projects, M&S reappointed our team to manage the introduction and expansion of the brand into the Chinese market. We were the Project Managers responsible for the fit-out and construction of department stores throughout China.

As previously executed for Hong Kong, our Project Management team prepared feasibility reports for market-entry into new Asian countries and provided them ongoing technical support. This long-term relationship resulted in several benefits for M&S including significant reduction in store fit-out costs and construction periods.

Our team has delivered ten M&S stores throughout China, in both first and second tier cities. With our Project Management team in place, all stores were delivered as per the client’s requests and vision. By adopting a proactive approach, the team identified and resolved the majority of project issues and potential risks during the early stages of the projects. This led to the successful delivery of stores within the set time frame, whilst accommodating ongoing changes to the design and budget restrictions. Other benefits were realized through providing value engineering services, including the decision to locally source most of the construction materials, which had a positive impact on the lead and delivery times, and therefore the overall project cost.